From Basic Instincts to Art Performance

Both science and the arts have largely disregarded cookery in their quests for the sublime and the beautiful; this article seeks to explicate why cookery has been excluded as a subject of analytical and aesthetic interest. By reexamining the particular sacredness attached to culture over time, this article outlines how processes of mastering spirit and knowledge go beyond physiology and physical senses (i.e., taste and smell). Fundamental causes for the decline of an established value order, which also gradually shifted the status of cookery, are identified. The development of food-related art and wisdom is considered in the context of the end of the cult of culture in its commonsense usage. This essay approaches food and the art of its preparation as an epistemological, aesthetic question, as well as an example for illustrating the decomposition of one value system and the foundation of another; it also details the new opportunities this transformation creates